Grafana vs Prometheus

What Grafana is

Grafana turns metrics, logs and traces into dashboards, and connects to almost any data source. The open-source version is fully capable; the cloud version removes the operational work. Its strength is that it does not own your data: it queries Prometheus, Loki, SQL databases and cloud providers where they already live. That also means Grafana alone is not a monitoring system, and you still have to choose and run the stores behind it.

What Prometheus is

Prometheus scrapes metrics from your services and stores them as time series, with its own query language for alerting and dashboards.

What Grafana is built to do

Data-source agnostic

Queries Prometheus, Loki, SQL and cloud APIs without moving data into Grafana.

Alerting

Evaluates rules against queries and routes notifications to external channels.

Dashboard as code

Stores dashboards as JSON so they can be versioned and provisioned.

Choose Grafana if

• Any team that needs to see what its systems are doing, from one server to a large fleet.

Choose Prometheus if

• Teams running services that need metrics and alerting they control.

Grafana: pros & cons

• Connects to dozens of data sources out of the box
• Open source and self-hostable
• Alerting built into the same tool as the dashboards
• Dashboard design takes real effort to get right
• Cloud pricing scales with data volume
• Configuration sprawl on large teams

Prometheus: pros & cons

• The de facto standard for metrics in Kubernetes
• Pull model means no agent pushing to you
• Free and open source
• Long-term storage needs an extra component
• PromQL takes time to learn
• Not built for logs or traces